2023 Hugos nomination stats!!

I believe we've hit 90 days later and they became required to release these. Here.

I don't understand their charts or EPH well enough to follow exactly what happened in Novel. It looks like Babel was third in raw nominations, and then has a value that doesn't change between subsequent rounds while other things are eliminated, and is just low enough at the end to not make the ballot, but also has an asterisk with a note that google-translates to "it wasn't eligible". I think there are some big questions here. Other than that, the first runner-up was something Chinese, and then Mountain in the Sea, which is neat to see it make it that far. Half-Built Garden also on the longlist.

In Novella, Prayer for the Crown-Shy is listed as having Declined Nomination, which is definitely a different annotation than Babel.

The Novelettes have both a Not Eligible and a Declined Nomination from SB Divya, who had said back in June that she was declining. "Turing Food Court" also seems to be on the list twice??

In screamtastic news Across a Field of Starlight got one less nomination than Supergirl. So close. So fucking close. And Other Ever Afters made the longlist too.

In Fan Writer, Paul Weimer (third most ballots, "not eligible") is on File 770 saying this is news to him and he'd like an explanation. He was a finalist in 2020, 21, and 22.

Xiran Jay Zhao was Not Eligible for the Astounding despite having been a first-year nominee in 2022. Zhao's final number is higher than Xin Weimu's, who did end up on the ballot.

I don't want to be like "soooo, I guess China could not be trusted with a Worldcon after all" but seriously, what the fuck happened here.

2023 Hugos nomination stats part two

Ok, some wild speculation regarding the stats. Other people have pointed out some other interesting features, like the ways the raw number of nominating votes goes off a cliff in some categories after the finalists. Dave McCarty, the one non-Chinese official who seems most likely to know what actually happened, has indicated that questions can be emailed to the committee, so, uh, so much for his credibility, but he's apparently willing to go down with this mess.

I guess I'm fascinated by the whole thing because, insofar as it seems like Something Dubious has happened here, it's interesting to me what it is and isn't? Like, if, hypothetically, you had a committee willing to go in full-throttle on falsifying results, I feel like you could do it much *better* than this, just looking at what the numbers looked like from the past couple of years and then cooking yours to resemble them. You could have Babel come in a narrow seventh for the ballot and we all might say "damn, okay, that's super surprising but I guess that's what happened".

Whatever happened here is... not that. You have the things that were brute-force de-eligibilized. You have Best Series nomination counts in the 800s and 900s - Wayward Children got 242 nominations in 2022, and now October Daye got the *least* nominations of the finalists with *816*??

It seems like there must have been either some kind of internal struggle or disagreement, such that the "honest" committee members weren't able to prevail, but are now able to expose what happened, or for the "dishonest" powers involved (whoever they might be) just don't give a shit, or are actively pleased to be able to show their power - because, after all, what's more powerful than knowing you can do as you like and never face any kind of consequences for it.

2023 Hugos, etc

Kevin Standlee has posted on Dreamwidth - sure looks like he's indirectly confirming Chinese government interference. (Honestly I feel like he's saying fuck you to anyone who thought China could possibly run an honest Worldcon, which feels a little unfair to me, like, I don't know, maybe we-the-voters (in this case not me-the-voter, as I don't attend and don't site-vote) did not thread the needle properly between appropriate skepticism about totalitarian states and outright racism about non-Anglophone fandom, but I think it's good if people were trying to avoid the latter!) I don't even know what I think should happen at this point. A frantic group text thread of all the winners trying to decide if they want to collectively reject their Hugos in retrospect?